WELCOME TAYLOR! Sorry I haven't been around much, summer school teaching has left my tank empty for a little while.

But I'm really delighted to welcome Oxblog's latest guest blogger, Taylor Owen. Taylor is a Canadian graduate student at Oxford and a hell of a nice bloke. He is interested in international relations, and in particular questions of security. He is also multilingual, prodigously hard-working and very active in his field. He helps edit a journal, runs his own blogsite, casts a suspicious eye over my occasional embrace of Atlanticist hegemony, and counts the strategic costs of America's bombing campaign in Cambodia.

He was recently appointed to a prestigious scholarship, which gives him 75 billion dollars a year, as many cars as he can eat, and unrestricted access to heads of state. I'll leave it to him to fill in the details. Lets just say, he's doing very well.

We last broke bread in New York. There we chatted about the commonalities and overlap between our respective philosophies on world affairs, and in particular the Darfur catastrophe.

At the risk of misrepresenting his world view, Taylor is more of a liberal internationalist, and stresses the need to combat the world's gravest security problems through laws, norms and agreements. But he is also keen to reignite a dialogue on where neoconservatives, 'democracy-promoting idealists', liberal hawks and Atlanticists can reach common ground.

He also has a thick skin and a broad back, and is interested in kicking some ideas around over here at Oxblog, whatever (friendly) fire he may draw from our forensic readers.

Welcome Taylor! blog away, and may the rain fall softly on your fields.